


Awake Ye Sinner

by trascendenza



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: AU, Episode: s02e03 The Kindness of Strangers, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-07
Updated: 2007-10-07
Packaged: 2017-10-07 09:36:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/63830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trascendenza/pseuds/trascendenza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Sylar smiles. "Machinations within machinations, Dr. Suresh."</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Awake Ye Sinner

**Author's Note:**

> For my dear tinheart, who needed some of this pairing.

"Mohinder…" he chokes out, breathless. Helpless.

His jaw clenches, the pain in his chest constricting the world into narrow and sharp points of agony.

_Mohinder,_ he tries again, not certain if he's actually speaking aloud, but he needs to try, because if he's going to die in the middle of the forest like this, alone, he has to… he has to…

_I'm broken, Mohinder,_ he unravels, unravels, vision swimming with things he wanted to say across a phone line, but he thought he'd have time, thought he'd be able to say them in person, so Mohinder could _see_, could see that he meant them, this time…

_I can't fix it, Mohinder. I can't fix it, this time._

The final threads unravel, and he is thrown into the relief of darkness.

*

When he wakes up, the first thing he notices is the antiseptic tinge in the air: he knows this smell.

But—

He can lift his arms. There are no restraints. His eyes open, blindly; fluorescence renders them useless.

"You're awake," comes the voice from the other end of the phone line, crisp, colder than the air in the room.

"Mohinder," he breathes, breathes, breathes.

"Sylar. Or should I say Gabriel?" He hears the affectionate irony and sighs, content, falling back onto the pillow.

When he sleeps again, it isn't in helplessness: he knows he is taken care of.

*

"By all accounts, you should be dead three times over." Mohinder waves the gun casually, like he's accustomed to accenting his speech with it.

"But you saved me." His face, stiffened with bandages, cracks with the beginnings of a smile.

"The _Company_ saved you." Mohinder's voice thins into a heated edge, cutting through the last vestiges of lingering drugged softness. "They had to stop me from putting you out of your misery."

"So why are _you_ here, Mohinder?" He watches Mohinder intently, breathing labored. "Why you? Of all the people they could send to watch me?"

When Mohinder turns away, the working line of his jaw tells Sylar everything he needs to know.

*

He skirts the borders of consciousness, the soothing beep of monitors a split-second echo following the reverberations of his pulse.

In this state, the elevated hearing becomes comfortable: he encompasses the room in aural shape.

The corners are empty—nothing he can use as a weapon, some part of his mind notes, and the floor smooth, devoid of character. There's the door, dominated by a locking mechanism that he listens to every time he's awake, learning its intricacies and whispers and unique patterns, its beautiful and familiar _language_ of metallic clicks.

And there, in the chair, is Mohinder. Watching. His heartbeat is erratic and the skin of his face is drawn, like a plastic bag used to smother breathing.

He pinches the bridge of his nose, dropping his head down. "Bastard," he whispers.

Sylar hears the layers in the word: _what have you done to me?_ just under the surface and at the very bottom, at the core, _why can't I leave you?_

And Sylar smiles in the shape of a beta wave. _Because I won't let you._

*

A week passes, and still his wrists and ankles remain unbound. Still he is allowed to hear the hooks and sharp corners and the fluid turns inside the lock to his sanctuary. The guards that stand outside the doors are foolish enough to think that they keep him prisoner, but they are simple creatures: they can't conceive of the pawns moving beyond their ken.

Sylar awakens, awakens more each passing day, observing the entirety of what surrounds him. He catalogues injuries with a detached interest, recording depth, severity and treatments because he can see Mohinder doing the same.

"You trust me," he insists when Mohinder slips a needle into his vein without the pretense of ushering in a guard.

"Hardly. You're powerless, Sylar. I could stop you with that bedpan over there, if I chose to."

He strokes two fingers upward, barely grazing the outer edge of Mohinder's elbow.

Mohinder doesn't flinch away.

_He trusts me._

So Sylar leaves the gun alone and focuses instead on the lock, when he isn't manipulating the monitors so that Mohinder will give him another shot.

*

The pain—he knows he was injured, but this is—

He falls to the floor when his knees give out, hands clenching to fists in his midsection; he curls into a fetal position around them.

"Sylar!" The monitors blare warnings as soon as they're out of his control, and Mohinder's there before he has a chance to shut them up.

Mohinder wraps Sylar's arm around his shoulder and hoists him back into the bed, one eye on the readouts and the other on getting Sylar's IVs back in place.

"You're progressing much faster than I expected," Mohinder says, laying the blanket up to Sylar's chest. "But you certainly can't walk."

Sylar takes huge gasping breaths, barely able to stay conscious. But just before he slips out with the drip, drip, drip of the needle, he hears Mohinder say _not yet_ like it's a promise he intends to keep.

*

It's so _easy._ He almost can't thrill in it: there's no challenge. The needle waits on the tray and the lock reposes quietly, in perfect alignment, just waiting for the slip of bent metal to slither inside and open her.

"Why?" He asks, sitting up, his voice clear, clear, clear and _awake_.

He lets the gun hover as a question mark in the air between them.

He hears Mohinder close his eyes, sees his shoulders bunch. "You really believe that I would be foolish enough to think a gun could stop you this time?"

Sylar steps off the bed; his tendons creak, but maintain.

"No."

He walks forward, presses his palm to the back of Mohinder's head. "Then why?"

Mohinder turns, a bitter smile on his face. His eyes, the tilt of his chin: they are a challenge. "And you knew there were no bullets in it. Why stay?"

Sylar smiles. "Machinations within machinations, Dr. Suresh."

"Our specialty." Mohinder's mirthless laugh feels like a cool kiss.

"You knew you couldn't keep me without killing me."

Mohinder doesn't shake his head, which is a type of assent.

"They'll punish you for this." Sylar leans in, tangling his fingers in Mohinder's curls. And maybe this was the plan—he has no desire to escape this.

Mohinder puts a hand on his chest; for a moment in suspended animation, for just a brief, surreal snapshot of reality where Sylar can hear every word Mohinder won't let himself speak, Mohinder is the one pulling _him_ forward and Mohinder's thumb presses just above his heartbeat. The mechanism clicks into place.

But as quickly as it came, the moment passes. The dream is too fragile to sustain, even when shared; Mohinder flattens his hand, _pushes_.

"You don't have to kill the guards," he says.

The prognosis is written and finalized; contact is cut. Mohinder looks away.

So Sylar leaves, without a backward glance. He doesn't kill the guards; they aren't worth his time, hapless sacks of meat with nothing to give him but blood and gore.

He's still in the middle of a forest, still lost, but he isn't dead, and that should be something. He has time, time, time, has opportunity: he can repair, rebuild, refine. He can fix the mechanism, he can go on. But underneath the empty reassurances of meaning lies a mantra, insistent and unending, intoning _he trusted you_ like a church bell tolling dirge to all that will heed its call.


End file.
